Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Commentary
April 1919
The poem speaks to me of a deeper, underlying reality - the closing lines bring that into focus for me. Given what I know of Sassoon’s war-service in France during WW1 (he was a contemporary of Wilfred Owen) I’m torn between deciding what drove him to write it - was it the idea of a dying serviceman surrounded by the horror of war who hears a song, as if birds flying out of sight, and the horror drops away as he realises the song never ends? Or was it his love of nature, the wider, realer world that he saw as he wrote this poem - realer and more deep than the man-made hell that he had witnessed and fought in?
The one thing the poem has without a doubt - hope. The song will never end.
Hash
Links
Biography of Sassoon: http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/
Sassoon poems on Minstrels:
Poem #385, Base Details
Poem # 535, The Working Party